MU professor details ADHD roots in book

Meet David.

He’s immature, easily angered, has a very short attention span and is entering the first grade. David’s kindergarten teacher has labeled him challenging.

By 10 a.m. on the first day of school, David’s first grade teacher wants him tested for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and she is already sending him on errands so that she can continue to teach the remainder of class without his disruptions.

This scenario is given in “Fostering Resilience in Young Children At Risk for Failure: Strategies for Grades K-3” by Melissa Stormont, an associate professor of special education in MU’s College of Education.

Children are at risk if they have characteristics stemming from negative circumstances that make them more likely to fail in school — for example, not having a home.

Stormont, who drew from her own research and that of others, focuses on what teachers can do as “individual agents of change.” She said a teacher’s expectations play a role in a child’s success or failure, and students can sense whether teachers like them or not.

“What children have been able to achieve by the end of third grade is highly predictive of their futures,” she said, speaking from experience. “My older sister has ADHD, and she experienced significant failure in school.”

Stormont, whose passion for ADHD children started with her sister, Jamie, recalls how her ADHD was unbelievably stressful for her mother. “She told me once that she was literally sick to her stomach for three years ... when my sister was in elementary school,” Stormont said.

She said that as a child, she watched her mom’s struggles and paid attention to sister’s needs in the family. “Nobody helped my mom feel OK,” she recalled.

Although Stormont’s focus has branched out to all at-risk children, she still has the same motivation: to promote change.

“Almost all children would have at least one at-risk characteristic in their life when they’re growing up,” she said. The message is that “risk doesn’t equate to failure.”

The children who are most at risk are those with families at risk, Stormont said. Those risks include poverty, limited resources, family adversity and stress. Near the top of the list are those families in which communication about their circumstances comes off negatively: for example, poverty can be conveyed to children as a crutch and not as a motivator.

When at-risk children go to school, their teachers may not know how to deal with them, and Stormont said teachers lower the bar in situations where they assume the parents aren’t involved.

“The teacher reacts to the characteristic of the child in a way that is very negative,” she said.

She gives the example of a child who comes from a background where English isn’t spoken and social skills, such as being quiet while the teacher is talking, aren’t taught. In that situation, punishment may not be appropriate, she said.

“Kindergartners sent to the principal’s office because they don’t have great social skills is not a good intervention,” Stormont said. She instead encourages teachers of young children to do what they do best: teach.